Zoa Pox/Lesions... A zoa lovers log

[ficklefins]

Since I had to drop out of the zoa trade :x because of this monster I thought I would make the best of this situation by documenting my attempts to rid myself of it.

I'm at work right now, but once I get home I'll take pics and elaborate on this issue.

June 20th:

Here is what I plan on doing today. Purchase a small 5 or 10 gallon tank to remove some zoas for some treatment. I am going to use a small tank with a HOB filter for water movement and a small heater. By using a small tank I hope to be able to do large water changes easily. Again, I'll keep everyone updated once I get home. Any suggestions or input would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Luciano

 

[Reefwifey]

Hi Luciano,

Sorry to hear you're having problems! How many colonies do you have the appear to be affected?

I had it with one colony. I did get rid of it, but I can't say which change it was the helped. My feeling is it may have had something to do with either: light cycle or temp fluxuations. I did get into the habit of manually running my lights, which ment they were on sometimes for 12-16 hours a day. Lessoning both the light cycle, and moving the colony to a shaded area *seemed* to help. The other change I can say for sure occured is that the tank I moved them to has more stable temp. In my nano I get some pretty rough temp swings, from like 76 - 84 at times.

I don't know if any of these things are really the cause, just wanted my variables out there.

Good luck!
Kammy

 

[ficklefins]

Boy am I slow on these updates.

Two days ago I did an almost 50% water change with a higher SG then normal. After reading the thread on RC regarding Pox, and getting advice from those on here, I had a feeling that there may have been something missing in my tank that these zoas were not getting. That is why I kept my SG up to 1.027 in my water change water. I also placed the zoas lower in the tank in an area with less light but has more exposure to my clean up crew.

Now after two days it seems that things are starting to look better. White spots are becoming fewer, polyps are opening up, and overall things are looking better. So far I lost about 20-30% of my polyps. It really attacked the smaller polyps but the stronger ones survived better and on some zoas were the only ones to survive.

I may be throwing out some crazy ideas here but I have a feeling that the cleanup crew may have helped. Not that they cleaned the pox, but they took care of the near death polyps which may have helped to spread the pox.

I'm still not sure of the cause but I do have some of the similar circumstances as others in the RC post. Newly introduced zoas, spring/summer time, SPS (not many), and perhaps the use of supplements.

To anybody wondering, the pox started on one very stressed out frag I got. It wiped out 80% of that frag, then it started to spread to zoas next to it. It went from zoa to zoa colony taking the smaller weaker zoas. The larger zoas pretty much kept the colonies alive by handeling the stress and spreading new roots.

Hopefully this thing is vanishing from my tank in the next week or two. I hope this thing doesn't happen in others tanks, but keep an eye on any stress. The first time I noticed the Pox it looked like a small piece of coral about 1/2 the size of a rice grain. At that time I thought nothing of it, but slowly over the next week or two it spread.

Good luck to all, and I hope to be back in the trading circles after everything has cleared. Give me another 2 months and you guys can take me off the zoa trading blacklist. :shock:

-Luciano
PS thanks for the support and advice!

 

[Azurel]

I knew you would do fine and not be manhandled by this...Good job so far keep it up!

 

[Azurel]

Any updates?

 

[ficklefins]

Still not in the clear, so the battle continues. These pox sure do stick around. Another water change today 7g before the move on Friday.


I still wear the scarlett letter


P

 

[ficklefins]

Well,

The problem is still here and continues to spread. Some lessons I have learned.

1.) They will spread from zoa to zoa, but won't touch any palys. It has been suggested that a palys toxin are too much for these pox to feed on.

2.) The critter or bacteria that causes this actually attaches to the side of a zoa and taps into it feeding on something inside the zoa.

3.) They probably spread to a new tank by obtaining a frag already infested. My POX started to appear on a frag I got from a local reefer.

4.) Small polyps are affected more than larger ones. Basically because these things suck the life out of zoas and the smaller the zoa the more it sucks out of it.

To sum things up I'm coming to the conclusion that these things are actually some type of pest and not a bacteria infection. Why do I think this? Mainly because of the evolution of the POX itself. It will gain access to a polyp and attach to it's side. It will start off as a small white spot and will quickly grow in size. While it sits under the skin it plunges through the zoa and sucks something out of the zoa, possibly zoaxanthelle (sp?). Once it has filled itself it will crust over on top and seemingly open up and spread to the nearest zoa it comes into contact with.

Recently I took a frag out of the tank to pick at the pox with a knife. I noticed that the larger polyps can be picked off the side and will either come off as a "cell" or as a broken white residue. The larger the Pox the more likely that it will be a harder cell.

Some suggestions and what I am going to attempt:

Most posts on RC about this suggest higher flow and more water changes.

My belief on why this works is because it keeps the POX from spreading by removal and disturbance. By keeping the water turbulet you reduce it's ability to drift to another zoa colony, and water changes remove the drifting pox, not allowing them to attach.

So I have purchased a 2.5 gallon tank that I put next to my other tank. This will allow me to keep the lighting the same but now I can QT infected frags. In this 2.5 gallon tank I have a mj900 that I will use for high flow, and I plan on doing 1 gallon water change every three or 4 days.

I'll keep everyone posted on the results.

 

[Azurel]

Thanks for the insite.....Keep us posted...

 

[ficklefins]

Thanks guys.

If the infected zoas can survive the current plague then I feel like the high flow and frequent water changes of my QT tank may be able to get rid of this issue.

 

[milkshake]

I have this same thing. I'm about ready to do away with zoos altogether. It's spreading like a wild fire.
I have a 20gal. that I'm going to setup 2morrow with a HOB filter and a 300gph pump with a hydor deflector. I will use a Coralife 2x65W PC fixture. Ficklefins, are you taking stabilized tank water from your show tank and then adding fresh R/O saltwater
to put into your 2.5 gallon? No sand or LR, right? Your just doing water changes and high flow, right?
No medications? I have to do something fast or I'm going to lose Awsome Blossoms, Jerry Garcia's, Supermans, Mama Cita's, Pink Panthers, 50+Blues, etc...etc...

George

 

[ficklefins]

George,

I haven't tested this yet so I'm not sure what the long term success will be! I am using brand new saltwater in there as I don't want any part of the infected tank coming into contact with the new tank. All this tank has is saltwater, zoas, and a pump. The ambient room temp keeps the water temp high, and the lights from the main tank keep the zoas lit. This Sunday I plan on doing a water change and siphoning debri off the bottom.

I moved them over yesterday and a lot of them opened after adjusting the water temp (got up to 86.5, yikes!). With a MJ900 in there I think the pump produces too much heat for that space, so I may buy a small pump from a petstore, or Home depot.

 

[jessiesgrrl]

I don't know anything about this pox, have never seen it yet. But I do like iodine dips just to help healing. Poor little guys, I hope they get better. I will help you out with re-establishment when/if you need it.

::hugs::
Laurie

 

[ficklefins]

Thanks for the words of encouragement Laurie. You also bring up a very good point. I will try and take some pics of the pox so that people will be able to recognize it if they ever see it.

The only good thing is that I can keep collecting palys, in fact I'm going to pick some up today.

 

[milkshake]

pox

I just threw away 3 frags that were infested with it. I took out 4 frags that are my high end zoos. I dipped them for 5 minutes in freshwater that had 3 drops of Loguls' Iodine. I shook them around several times to make sure that all areas were exposed to the iodine. I took them out and rinsed of in the sump real quick to rid of excess iodine. I have now put them on a towel in the bathroom where there is no airflow and the bathroom door stays closed. I will let them sit in there for 3 hours so they will dry out some. 2morrow I will do the same with the remaining high end zoos. Hopefully this will help.

Thanks for the kind words Laurie!! If this does not work, I may just stop collecting zoos all together. It would be a different story if someone knew what this stuff is and knew how to rid of it. Oh well...we will just see what happens. uke: That's what it feels like.

 

[twon8]

I have had a few colonies develop these over the past few weeks, I don't think anymore have gotten them, but I wonder if maybe the pox are related to nudi's in any way, as i have found a few during fw dips on the afflicted colonies. Are the pox maybe tiny nudi's which hatch on the side of the tissue and then invade the tissue of the polyps? Just throwing that out there.

I have noticed the same thing about the pox sometimes being external and other times it is clearly inside the tissue.

I have also noticed that they dont bother paly's or a good number of different zoas, though they seem to really like dragon eyes and my yellow brick roads.

 

[jessiesgrrl]

I was just thinking about it, and if it is a parasite, has anyone tried treating it like one? Ie, dabbing thick Kalk paste directly onto the pox itself, or a straight salt paste?

Or something worse... like a toothpick dipped in something horrible like malachite and touch it to just the pox part? Or Doxycycline? I mean, as far as malachite and copper, if you are going to throw them away and not replace them into the main tank, it'd be interesting to see what happened to them after that in a QT tank.

Probably stupid, but was just a random thought I had.

Laurie

 

[jessiesgrrl]

Re: pox

I just threw away 3 frags that were infested with it. I took out 4 frags that are my high end zoos. I dipped them for 5 minutes in freshwater that had 3 drops of Loguls' Iodine. I shook them around several times to make sure that all areas were exposed to the iodine. I took them out and rinsed of in the sump real quick to rid of excess iodine. I have now put them on a towel in the bathroom where there is no airflow and the bathroom door stays closed. I will let them sit in there for 3 hours so they will dry out some. 2morrow I will do the same with the remaining high end zoos. Hopefully this will help.

Thanks for the kind words Laurie!! If this does not work, I may just stop collecting zoos all together. It would be a different story if someone knew what this stuff is and knew how to rid of it. Oh well...we will just see what happens. uke: That's what it feels like.

I know the feeling, not from the pox but from watching other stuff die I was really excited about. uke: is right. :::HUGS::


Laurie

 

[ficklefins]

Here are some POX pics:

Here is a colony that has a medium level infection. A low level infestation will be 2-3 pox on a colony while a high level will have 90% or more of the polyps infected.

Medium infection:

Here is a good size and color comparison for small size pox. The darker the pox the older the pox.

This is a majority of what I as able to extract from the infected colony above. As you can see some of it is milky (younger pox) and others are pretty much little cells.

I just had one of those Eureeka moments. You can't really tell from the pix above, but the larger infected areas actually look very similar to snail eggs you see on aquarium walls. I hate these creatures.

 

[jessiesgrrl]

http://www.z-life.info/ssnail.html

Check out the snail eggs on Day 1 and Day 3?

Prolly not the same type of snail, but does it generally fit what you found? If so, I will start trying to research snail taxonomy sites.

Laurie

 

[ficklefins]

Laurie,

The strange thing about your link is that I have noticed some similar to the day 8-13 appearing near my infected zoas.

To update those reading this thread, my QT tank is actually doing really well. All the zoas in there have opening like crazy! I haven't seen such health from these colonies in a long time. I don't know if my QT tank is working to deal with the POX issue, but I have now come to a conlclusion that I need a Prop tank.

Who would have thought that 2.5g tank with a single powerhead could have such a positive effect on zoas. In all seriousness my prop tank looks better than my main tank. I think the softies and anemones in my main tank may have been stressing my zoas.